The May Day brand traffic grab

As the May Day holiday approaches, various industry markets are bound to usher in a new wave of consumption peaks. At the same time, competition for brand traffic will once again reach a fever pitch.

However, as the growth rate of the Internet population approaches zero and the traffic dividend period declines, many industry brands have entered into a stock game. It is difficult to maintain a balance between input and return by relying solely on a pure traffic purchasing model.

As a result, more and more brands are beginning to focus on "content-driven traffic growth". But during marketing periods like May Day, while user traffic is growing exponentially, content marketing competition is also growing exponentially.

In this context, how can brands improve their content marketing to seize opportunities for explosive growth? Previously, many brands have joined forces with Baidu Marketing to use the two major gameplay methods of "co-creation of expert content" and "content + social linkage" to point out the direction for brands that are about to face the battle for traffic.

Co-create content with experts, adapt the influence of experts to brand characteristics, and enhance content penetration

KOLs on various platforms have always been a major source of traffic attraction. Baidu Baike brings together outstanding creators from various fields such as technology, finance, and life, including many key KOLs in the industry.

Reasonably leveraging the vertical or pan-industry influence of these KOLs is undoubtedly a "shortcut" for brands to quickly radiate, expand their influence, and deeply penetrate users in various fields. Baidu Marketing also helps brands to efficiently match and connect with KOLs.

When NetEase Games' "Naraka: Bladepoint" entered the new season, it collaborated with experts through the Star Selection to create a new game, and output a large number of graphic, text, and short video explanations and content at a high frequency, allowing it to quickly reach the peak of popularity.

In addition to mature industry markets such as beauty, automobiles, and games, almost all brands in all categories can find vertical experts in their respective fields on Baidu's content marketing platform Duxingxuan. Even emerging industry brands like Haier Sanyi Bird, which is involved in the IoT field and focuses on smart home scene services, can find suitable experts.

Whether you are interested in the field of technology or want to learn about home furnishing, you probably noticed Haier Sanyi Bird’s series of industry reviews some time ago. From pictures, texts, videos to updates, these analyses all originated from a brand essay contest - this essay contest not only mobilized cross-border participation from experts in multiple fields, but also developed multiple content formats, and combined with Baidu APP's intelligent recommendations, it accurately and widely covered the target population of the brand.

From the above cases, it is not difficult to summarize the unique advantages of Baidu Marketing in promoting co-creation between brands and influencers:

First, through cooperation with brands in various industries, it has created a mature content co-creation model: Under the framework of brand solicitation activities, Baidu Marketing cooperates with the Duxingxuan content marketing platform to help brands efficiently invite top and mid-level KOLs in various industries to co-create and disseminate brand content information, and can further expand its traffic channels through Baidu's intelligent recommendations.

Second, under this model, Baidu has gathered outstanding creative talents from all fields and has a rich and complete content ecosystem.

Ultimately, with the support of a mature co-creation model and a rich content ecosystem, each brand can connect with influencers who are highly compatible with the brand's own characteristics in marketing, continuously produce high-quality content, accurately direct traffic to the target population, and further enhance the attractiveness of the content.

Content + social interaction, activate the communication initiative of the majority of users, and build a full link of content growth

As key influencers, influencers can quickly increase the influence of brands and bring in natural traffic through original content. Among the sources of this traffic, there is a group of people that cannot be ignored - the vast number of ordinary users.

Especially as this generation of users has a stronger sense of autonomy and gradually gains absolute voice in decentralized content dissemination, brands need to pay more attention to how to stimulate users' initiative in content creation and dissemination in content marketing.

Under this trend, Baidu Marketing has come up with a second trick in its cooperation with brands: "Linking content and social networking to maximize user participation in content creation and dissemination, thereby exponentially expanding the content traffic growth channel."

As the world's leading Chinese community, Baidu Tieba brings together users from all over the country and all walks of life. Its influence covers all consumer levels, and naturally it has become the main battlefield for content and social linkage marketing.

In the first quarter, which is both the start of work and school and the peak sales season for the 3C industry, Dell's trip to Tieba successfully boosted its peak season traffic:

Dell attracted the first wave of attention through the coverage of the opening screen, header images, mini-programs, and forum information flow. In parallel, in-depth evaluations by forum owners and experts in various forums where the target population gather, as well as interactive conversations among fan users, form a key closed loop of "interest-cognition-introduction to purchase." In addition to Tieba, we cooperate with Duxingxuan to conduct KOL evaluations to continue to increase the effectiveness of promoting the product.

The content created by influencers and the spontaneous sharing and dissemination by users have brought more considerable popularity to the brand. At the same time, Dell is also promoting mini-programs to convert traffic into visible sales.

It is worth noting that the content-social linkage model can not only directly direct traffic to online shopping malls, but also build a closed loop of traffic conversion and sedimentation for brands that rely on offline sales conversions. Zhenai.com, whose brand business spans both online and offline, is an example.

In this season of singlehood, Zhenai.com launched an event for people to meet up in the same city. On the one hand, it used Baidu Tieba to interact with other people, inviting them to participate in online matching and blind date group chat activities, thus directly directing traffic to its APP. On the other hand, it also initiated offline store visit invitations in the same interaction to direct traffic to its offline stores. Combined with the strong exposure of the Tieba APP opening screen and the targeted population/regional promotion of "Tie+", this activity successfully achieved dual-line traffic growth.

After reading these two cases, 007 believes that it is important to mention here that the characteristics of Tieba that distinguish it from other content social platforms have created the advantage that its content and social linkage can more easily drive user traffic: compared with the "shallow social interaction" of users on completely open platforms, Tieba friends who are gathered together by specific tags such as interests and regions have closer social connections, and are therefore easier to spread and promote each other, and are also easier to initiate offline activities and conduct offline traffic diversion.

There are more than one way to socialize. In the video era, in addition to the text and picture interactions in Tieba, brand live streaming is also a social venue that drives users to interact and feedback in real time through content sharing. Friends with a keen sense of fashion will certainly not miss the live broadcast of Dior's 2022 Fall/Winter ready-to-wear show last month. One of the main channels for this live broadcast is Baidu Baijiahao Fashion Account.

Before creating this brand social scene, Dior also used resources such as special search cards, hot search lists, and fashion channel banners to continuously gather momentum and divert traffic, thereby attracting active users with relevant attention and interaction intentions to the live broadcast to the greatest extent possible.

It is not difficult to see from these cases that the content + social linkage gameplay not only activates users. In addition to discovering stronger brand attraction, we are also building a full-link content growth chain for brands: through resources such as opening screens, we first help brand content to achieve wide coverage and penetrate user perception; then with the help of social gameplay, such as post bars and live broadcasts, we can conduct diversified user reach and interaction to achieve mind capture; and the effective traffic finally attracted can be converted and accumulated into long-term brand assets through mini programs.

Speaking of this, I wonder if you have also noticed that in addition to products such as Tieba and live streaming, Baidu Marketing has also been accelerating the application of AI in marketing in recent years. We can boldly assume: In the future, will Baidu Marketing, based on its AI technological strength, further upgrade "content + social" and open up greater imagination space through AR interaction, virtual digital human interaction, and the creation of metaverse experience?

Of course, in addition to using social media to achieve online traffic diversion, offline traffic can also be achieved through scene and content linkage. Last year, Dior cooperated with Baidu Maps by opening the screen + searching for preset words + clicking on the "Dior icon" POI on the map homepage during its exhibitions/new store marketing in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu, allowing offline content experiences to be directed through multiple online scenarios and reach more potential consumers. At this time, content-based user social interaction and feedback to online dissemination and sharing are also happening in offline scenarios.

Future growth direction: Seize the traffic from influencers and social media, and stick to the content growth strategy

In fact, whether it is co-creation with influencers, leveraging influencers' own traffic, or linking content + social, activating users through social sharing and interaction, and bringing about traffic fission, in the final analysis, the growth path that Baidu Marketing has shown for many brands is the same - that is, to continuously create brand content attractiveness.

Finally, just like the above cases and the Baidu marketing cases shared by 007 in the past, brands can always upgrade the attractiveness of content driven by the platform’s endless content gameplay, thereby leveraging growth. Among these dazzling gameplay modes, brands only need to stick to the same underlying development idea: stick to the content strategy.

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, based on the era of inventory, creating "good content" through KOLs, ordinary users and brands can not only leverage large traffic at a lower cost, but also build deeper communication with brand users and stimulate long-term purchases and growth. Content strategy will surely be the secret to the growth and expansion of many brands in the next decade.

Author: 007 in the PR world

Source: 007 in the PR world